The proposed research is a pilot study of the changing character of ethnicity in a New England urban community. The major objective of the study is to explore the hypothesis that the classical 1930's social order of "Yankees" and "Ethnics" described by Warner in his Yankee City monographs is being displaced by another system based on locality, length of residence, and life style. The methods to be used in the study are chiefly anthropological: observations and interviews in the local community; collection of selected family histories at least three generations in depth; description of major changes in the status of ethnic groups, using Warner's studies for the 1930's as a base line; a semiotic anthropological analysis of the local cultural heritage, their values and world views as expressed in cultural performances and in cultural symbols and signs; a comparison of ethnicity in the 1930's and in the 1970's. Confirmation would show how the "melting pot" has been working, not only directly through acculturation and assimilation of "ethnics" to "Yankees," but also indirectly, through the emergence of a non-ethnic system of social and cultural differentiation and integration that coexists with, and transcends the classical system of urban ethnicity that Warner described for the 1930's and that is still widely believed to be the "normal" system in American cities. A partial confirmation of the hypothesis would have important practical and theoretical implications in broadening the framework within which the perception and analysis of urban ethnicity moves, beyond the traditional limits of race, national origin and religion.